A full third of Americans say they are “very closely” watching updates on the debate over the looming spending cuts and tax increases, outpacing other big news stories. Some 28 percent say they are closely following the investigation into the terrorist attack on American outposts in Benghazi, while 27 percent say they are paying close attention to the brewing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

***

Public opinion is another. The U.S. economy resembles a sick patient who’s been put on a powerful drug: budget deficits. If the drug is withdrawn too abruptly, the patient relapses. That’s the fiscal cliff. But if the drug is never withdrawn, the patient may face highly toxic side effects. That’s a future financial crisis that occurs if lenders refuse to lend at low interest rates. It seems confusing, because it is confusing.

Curb those deficits — but not too fast. No one has adequately explained the messy choices to Americans. Not the president. Not major economists. Not congressional leaders. We are now as far away from the next election as we’ll ever be; the economy is in a modest recovery. Is there a better time to grapple with these perplexing and unpopular problems? Or do we gamble that we can drift along indefinitely?

***

Right now, Democrats are demanding that Republicans raise taxes while Republicans are demanding that Democrats agree to cut Social Security and Medicare spending. A grand bargain this fall, then, would mean that Republicans get to raise revenue from their own supporters (small-business job creators) in exchange for cutting spending for their own supporters (seniors). Genius! Much better to wipe the slate clean, and start over with more leverage for fundamental tax reform and structural entitlement reform.

What if we go off the fiscal cliff and Democrats still won’t negotiate? Then Republicans should make clear that they are willing to live with the higher, Clinton-era rates. It will be hard for the Democrats to paint such a scenario as an economic disaster, because letting the Bush tax cuts expire simply restores the status quo during the Clinton administration. During the campaign, President Obama repeatedly told us how he wants to “go back to the income tax rates we were paying under Bill Clinton — back when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history, and plenty of millionaires to boot.” Well if the Clinton tax rates were so great, let’s go back to all of the Clinton rates and relive the booming ’90s.

Niskanen looked at both spending and taxes as a percentage of GDP. On average, he found, if federal revenues declined by 1 percent, federal spend- ing increased by 0.15 percent. When revenues rose, on the other hand, relative spending decreased. A fur- ther study in 2009 by another Cato economist, Michael New, came to the same conclusion after the gluttonous administration of George W. Bush. Under Bush and his mostly Republican Congress, new benefits like subsidized Medicare drugs and increased federal education spending followed on the heels of large tax cuts.

Niskanen’s explanation for the failure of STB was straightforward, a conjecture based on standard eco- nomics: When you cut the price of something, demand for it will increase. Lowering taxes without lowering benefits meant that tax- payers were getting the benefits at a discount. The government made up the true cost with borrowed dollars that future taxpayers would have to repay. There was a big difference, Niskanen said, between a kid on an allowance and the federal government: The government has a credit card with no debt limit.

***

In fact, the rising American electorate represents a direct threat to the striking array of government benefits for the affluent that the conservative movement has won over the past 40 years. These include the reduction of the top income tax rate from 50 percent in 1986 to 35 percent; the 15 percent tax rate on dividend and capital gains income, which was 39.9 percent in 1977; the lowering of the top estate tax rate from 70 percent in 1981, with just $175,000 exempted from taxation, to a top rate of 35 percent this year with $5.1 million exempted from taxation…

In effect, the 21st century version of class conflict sets the stage for an exceptionally bitter face-off between the left and the right in Congress. The national government is facing the prospect of forced austerity, weighing such zero-sum choices as raising capital gains taxes or cutting food stamps, slashing defense spending or restricting unemployment benefits, establishing a 15 cents-a-gallon gasoline tax or pushing citizens off the Medicaid rolls, pushing central bank policy favorable to the financial services industry or curtailing Medicare eligibility.

In broader terms, the political confrontation pits taxpayers, who now form the core of the center-right coalition, against tax consumers who form the core of the center-left. According to the Tax Policy Center, 46.4 percent of all tax filers had no federal income tax liability in 2011 (although most people pay a combination of state, sales, excise, property and other levies).There are clear exceptions to this dichotomy, as many Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries (tax recipients) vote Republican, and many college-educated upper-income citizens of all races and ethnicities (tax payers) vote Democratic. Nonetheless, the overarching division remains, and the battle lines are drawn over how to distribute the costs of the looming fiscal crisis. The outcome of this policy fight will determine whether Limbaugh is correct to fear that his side has “lost the country.”

Despite dramatic international news dominating the headlines across the globe, Americans are watching the negotiations to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” more closely than any other news story, according to a new poll from Pew Research.

Like what? They need to be watching it too. And stick that “so-called” in sideways, yeah?

And then Niskanen, looking over 25 years of budget data, noticed something about [“starve the beast”]: It didn’t work. In fact, attempts to starve the beast by tax cuts seemed to lead to increased federal spending.
================

At least going back to the Clinton rates would put more people on the tax rolls, and give more Americans a stake in constraining government spending. It would also force all Americans — including the middle class — to pay for growing government services, instead of borrowing the money from China and passing the costs on to the next generation.

Perhaps this is it. A large section of middle America has forgotten what it means to have to pay the full cost of government.

Giving the Democrats what they claim to want — at least fiscally — maybe the best medicine for voters.

LIB.. There is about half of America that needs a lesson. My mom just tells people to use their Obamaphone now if they ask for help. Also, can Jindal just shut up already. President Jindal isn’t going to happen. Rubio has the Bushes and I’m assuming Ryan gets Romney’s heavy weight fundraising network.

if god created humans in his image, why they are so many stupid humans?

nathor on November 19, 2012 at 10:22 PM

A person’s practical intelligence is limited by their suppositions, and the world is filled with untruths, and people are practically unintelligent when they attempt to reach rational conclusions based on those untruths — their conclusions are frequently wrong. When people base their decisions on those wrong conclusions, they appear to be acting irrationally, or “stupidly” if you prefer.

Another way: People aren’t usually born stupid, they are taught to be stupid by people that fill their minds with stupid ideas.

(I can’t prove any of that supposition, and to act on it without first determining the validity of it is to risk stupidity.)

Despite dramatic international news dominating the headlines across the globe, Americans are watching the negotiations to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” more closely than any other news story, according to a new poll from Pew Research.

LMAO, you all dropped that ball America. Tune out and get high the next 4 years.

my Grandma sent me this (shows old people know their stuff, at least old people in my family)

To all my Democratic friends (yes, I have some)
The election is over, the talking is done.
My party lost, your party won.
So let us be friends, let arguments pass.
I’ll hug my elephant, you kiss your azz.
Have a great day!

LIB.. There is about half of America that needs a lesson. My mom just tells people to use their Obamaphone now if they ask for help. Also, can Jindal just shut up already. President Jindal isn’t going to happen. Rubio has the Bushes and I’m assuming Ryan gets Romney’s heavy weight fundraising network.

Bill # 1: Give Obama and the democrats exactly what they want. Extend the Bush tax cuts for people making under $ 200,000. This will automatically increase taxes on the job creators who make more than $ 200,000, almost all job creators, and let the economy go into the toilet… Pass the bill and let Obama and the democrats own the disaster…

Bill # 2: Extend the Bush tax cuts for the job creators who are making $ 200,000. This bill is assured to fail or Obama would certainly veto it… This will also make Obama and the democrats own the disaster of the economy going into hell…

Despite dramatic international news dominating the headlines across the globe, Americans are watching the negotiations to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” more closely than any other news story, according to a new poll from Pew Research.

I’m all of a sudden not convinced by a poll. I think I’ll go with my gut feelings on this one.

If Gallup shows that the republicans will get the blame I say give democrats what they want. I’m serious. Pass it all. Just vote present.

mrscullen on November 19, 2012 at 10:27 PM

Nope, that won’t work. When the system crashes, the media will blame the Republicans because they “just stood by” while the disastrous policies were implemented.

With the media being what it is, there is no winning strategy for the Republicans by which they can avoid being tarred with the “being evil” brush. Better they actually grow a pair and a spine and loudly, vocally explain why they are taking a principled stand.

Those that won’t learn from History are doomed to try overs. FDR tanked the economy and got a second (like Obama) and a third and a forth try over. People opted for the bird in the hand rather than the two in the bush. Why would you think they will be different come 2014 and 2016.

A person’s practical intelligence is limited by their suppositions, and the world is filled with untruths, and people are practically unintelligent when they attempt to reach rational conclusions based on those untruths — their conclusions are frequently wrong. When people base their decisions on those wrong conclusions, they appear to be acting irrationally, or “stupidly” if you prefer.

ok, you have stupid people due their false beliefs that are given to them with no fault of their own but you also have stupid stupid. you know what I mean.

Another way: People aren’t usually born stupid, they are taught to be stupid by people that fill their minds with stupid ideas.

ok, who is teaching people stupid ideas both on the left an right?
on the right I vote for glenn beck!

(I can’t prove any of that supposition, and to act on it without first determining the validity of it is to risk stupidity.)

Better they actually grow a pair and a spine and loudly, vocally explain why they are taking a principled stand.

AZfederalist on November 19, 2012 at 10:41 PM

And then fall down like Tyson winked at by Lewis.

I’ve been trying to figure out how this might be done. To compromise is to share (and then shoulder) the blame. So don’t compromise. Just lose. And never shut up about what a bad idea it is and how you wish you had the authority to stop it (all true).

With the media being what it is, there is no winning strategy for the Republicans by which they can avoid being tarred with the “being evil” brush. Better they actually grow a pair and a spine and loudly, vocally explain why they are taking a principled stand.

To compromise is to share (and then shoulder) the blame. So don’t compromise. …

Axe on November 19, 2012 at 10:45 PM

I agree with not compromising. The House has equal power as the Senate. The House has passed 3 budgets in the past 3 years, the Senate, none. The House has passed bills to restore the economy and Dingy Harry has tabled them. Time for the House to stand up and vocally, by all means possible let the American people know that it is the Senate that is obstructing. At least put up a Speaker who doesn’t sound like he’s already defeated whenever he opens his mouth.

“Letters from the Earth” was one of Mark Twain’s final assaults on the stupidity and hypocrisy of man and an apparently capricious and malevolent God. It lacks his customary humor and seems to be written in a tone of outrage. Satan goes to the earth and sends these letters to his friends, the archangels Gabriel and Michael. What he finds is a complete disconnect between professed belief and action. Twain turns accepted doctrines and smug platitudes on their heads to bolster his assertions. The Problem of Evil has troubled men since Sumerian times at the very latest. Twain holds God responsible for creating human nature the way it is and the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’ as well, and the atrocities of his time are no worse than those sanctioned in the Bible. If the reader can keep an open mind, some interesting insights and disquieting thoughts might enter.–Submitted by Charles Steele

—

Dripping with sarcasm about religion, it would make Christopher Hitchens proud. Although, Mark Twain was much less rude than Hitchens, I suspect that Hitchens enjoyed this book as much as I did.–Submitted by Gerry Goldlist

Liberal Man of the Year
Chief Justice Roberts shares the dais with Lena Dunham.
*******************************************************

No Supreme Court Justice has ever said “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night,” at least on national television, but give it time. This month Glamour magazine named Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg one of its “Women of the Year.” And Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently told a muppet on “Sesame Street” that “Pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career,” which is true, unless you were born to the House of Windsor.

But none of his colleagues can compete with the media acclaim cascading over Chief Justice John Roberts after his solo decision upholding the Affordable Care Act this June. The editors of Esquire have included Chief Justice Roberts in their December “Americans of the Year” issue, praising his “nimbleness.” After the Citizens United decision on free speech and political spending, he found a way “to save the court’s credibility.”

Chief Justice Roberts shares the Esquire honor with Lena Dunham, the star of an Obama campaign ad and the creator and star of the HBO series about 20-something sexual angst called “Girls.”

She and the Chief Justice also make the Atlantic Monthly’s list of “Brave Thinkers” of 2012, by which they mean thinkers who agree with the Atlantic’s liberal editors. Ms. Dunham is praised for taking “the soft glow off the ‘chick flick,'” for instance when her character acts “like an underage street hooker to turn her boyfriend on,” while the Chief Justice gets credit for “maintaining the Court’s legitimacy” with a ruling “both brave and shrewd.” President Obama probably has Time’s “Person of the Year” nailed down, but expect the Chief to finish a close second.

Such is the strange new respect a conservative receives for sustaining liberal priorities. Our own view is less effusive, and to expiate his ObamaCare legal sins, a fair punishment would be that he hire Ms. Dunham as a clerk.
=====================================

If Gallup shows that the republicans will get the blame I say give democrats what they want. I’m serious. Pass it all. Just vote present.

mrscullen on November 19, 2012 at 10:27 PM

I agree with you, let Obama and America own their policies. Remember in 2008 when Republicans refused to support the bank bailouts at first? Democratic support collapsed as well because even though they controlled Congress, they didn’t want to own their own policy. Republicans of course broke in the end, but that was before the Tea Party movement. Make the Democrats own their policies.

I think the GOP should just fully embrace Simpson-Bowles and force Obama to reject his own bipartisan commission. If, err when he rejects it by having Harry Reid bury it in the Senate, then they should vote present and let his agenda pass (unless it involved the creation of more federal bureaucracies).

I think I’m going to sit the rest of the night out. My blood pressure is just not being done by the idiocy of the administration and its apologists in the media (but I repeat myself) and the trolls as well as the antics of the Stupid Party in its efforts to see how fast they can capitulate.

If Gallup shows that the republicans will get the blame I say give democrats what they want. I’m serious. Pass it all. Just vote present.

mrscullen on November 19, 2012 at 10:27 PM

Yes, this is what they should do, but they don’t have the guts.

Mark1971 on November 19, 2012 at 10:38 PM

Depending on how many Dems vote for the bill you’d need about 20 Republicans as well. That is, unless Harry Reid just takes an already passed HB, yanks out the inside, and passes it with reconciliation. The Republicans are likely going to do everything to make a deal with the devil and in the end Harry will screw over America while blaming Republicans.

President Obama’s decisive reelection has promised the conservative new media four more years of fodder, but it’s also left some of its more earnest participants with a gnawing question: What went wrong?

The new online right came roaring out of 2008 convinced that the only reason Obama won was because John McCain’s weak-stomached campaign — cowed by the aura of the first black presidential nominee — had failed to document his ties to the radical left. Their mission would be to “vet” the president as McCain hadn’t, and convince the American people to reject him.

Now the loose coalition of scrappy bloggers, advocacy journalists, and unrepentant trolls who spent four years writing about Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky are coming to terms with reality: The polls weren’t skewed, and their narrative didn’t stick.

And with the Republican Party now in full-throttle soul-searching mode, many in the conservative blogosphere are turning introspective as well.

“I think the right media may have erred,” Dan Riehl, a contributor to Breitbart News and longtime proprietor of Riehl World News, told BuzzFeed a week after the election. “I think we let Obama get into our heads and we wound up campaigning against him, rather than for the things we believe in.”

“It was a trap,” he added. “And one I can’t say I didn’t fall into.”

In hindsight, Riehl questioned the wisdom of devoting so much energy to combing through the president’s early life for signs of radicalism — a process that yielded few true exposés, but rather a handful of scraps that bloggers tried to spin into scandals. For example, in March, Breitbart News reported that Obama attended a 1998 production of a play about left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky. The story, which was presented as a major scoop on the site, included this memorable lede:

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama claims that he worried after 9/11 that his name, so similar to that of Osama bin Laden, might harm his political career.

But Obama was not always so worried about misspellings and radical resemblances. He may even have cultivated them as he cast himself as Chicago’s radical champion.

“I just don’t know that America cared,” Riehl now says of this story genre. “The guy had already been elected, and our message was that Barack Obama’s a socialist that wants to control your life. I’m not arguing that he isn’t, but is that a message people want to hear?”

The notion that Obama’s unusual name, international roots, and time as a liberal Chicago leader would disqualify him was an early fixation of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and a running preoccupation of some of her die-hard supporters, who staked their final hopes on the emergence of a legendary, apocryphal recording of his wife using the word “whitey.”

Six months year later, frustrated conservatives blamed Obama’s landslide victory on John McCain’s failure to take the fight to his opponent.

The consensus soon emerged on the right was that if Americans were fully aware of Obama’s relationship with extremists like Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, they never would have elected him. And since tank-dwelling mainstream reporters couldn’t be trusted to expose The Real Obama, it would be left to the crusading online right to get the job done.

Breitbart News efficiently captured this sentiment with a mission statement earlier this year, where they promised to “vet the president.”

Prior to his passing, Andrew Breitbart said that the mission of the Breitbart empire was to exemplify the free and fearless press that our Constitution protects–but which, increasingly, the mainstream media denies us…

Andrew wanted to do what the mainstream media would not. First and foremost: Andrew pledged to vet President Barack H. Obama.

The mission of the conservative media, then, became less to “stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!'” — as National Review’s founding editor famously put it — and more to stand athwart the New York Times White House coverage, yelling “Biased!”

Some conservative writers now worry that their media outlets spent too much time poking and prodding old-guard journalistic institutions rather than digging up dirt on the Obama administration.

“My impression from the outside was that the target of the vetting effort was always the mainstream media, not really the president,” said Ben Domenech, a conservative blogger and co-founder of the long-running conservative blog RedState.com.

Domenech said conservative coverage of Obama’s first term drifted “too often toward entertainment and mockery, and too little toward the critical and hard work of investigation.”

“I think it’s a bit disappointing that the major scandals during Obama’s administration thus far have all been broken by mainstream media entities, not journalists on the right,” he added.

But as 2012 heated up, so did the right’s efforts to expose Obama and his lapdogs, with conservative outlets never flinching in their insistence that America wouldn’t fall for the great “Obama con” again. When the polls seemed to dispute that narrative, bloggers pushed back by charging that the surveys’ results were “skewed.”

Dean Chambers, the previously obscure conservative blogger who gained notoriety for re-weighting public polls to make them more favorable to Mitt Romney, was not shy about his motives.

“I’ve been hearing from people inside the Tea Party movement and Republican movement calling to say that they support what I’m doing,” Chambers told BuzzFeed in September. “It’s given them a boost of confidence.”

But now that the votes have been cast, conservative outlets are left picking up the pieces of their shattered narrative, as the movement they’ve championed looks to rebuild and rebrand itself.

John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a prolific tweeter, said that as the GOP tries to widen its tent in the coming months and years, conservative sites will need to stay out of the way — or better yet, cheer on the effort.

He singled out RedState.com, which has earned credibility on the right, in part, by targeting vulnerable moderates in Republican primaries, and directing grassroots readers to defeat them. Podhoretz warned against the site’s “hunger and desire to establish an ideological party line and draw boundaries around it, and say anyone who’s not in this line should not be elected and should be destroyed.”

“A deliberate choice is going to have to be made,” he said. “Is RedState a news and information website, or is it an activist partisan Republican website pushing specific politicians? Regrettably, right now I think it’s more the latter than the former.”

Podhoretz rejected the notion that Obama’s reelection represented a failure of the conservative media. Still, he distinguished between “high-minded” publications like his own, and the “much more scrappy, low down, tough, take-no-prisoners ad hominem stuff” published on certain websites, and said that the latter’s approach was misguided.

“The Daily Caller may have thought that surfacing a speech from 2007 was going to ruin the election for him, but I think that was a foolish hope,” Podhoretz said. “He’d already been elected in spite of all that.”

The speech in question was actually emblematic of the failed storyline many conservative outlets tried to advance during Obama’s first term.

The day before the first presidential debate in October, The Drudge Report began teasing a supposed campaign bombshell to be dropped that night, plastering cryptic headlines across the homepage like, “THE ACCENT… THE ANGER… THE ACCUSATIONS… THE SERMON.”

As it turned out, the scoop — which belonged to The Daily Caller — was a video recording of a 2007 speech Obama gave bemoaning the injustices suffered by poor African-American communities, and seeming to suggest that the lackluster federal response to Hurricane Katrina was a result of racial bias. The speech had been covered by the press when it was first delivered, but The Caller touted footage of off-script remarks that didn’t make it into the official transcript.

The story had all the trappings of a surefire entry into the conservative cannon of 2012: racial overtones, confirmation that Obama was concealing his true extremism, and a chance for conservative champions of truth to accuse the mainstream media of covering up Obama’s true nature.

But despite half a day of hype courtesy of Drudge, and an A-block unveiling on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, the scoop landed with a thud outside the conservative echo chamber. The video got little pickup in the national media, and was quickly overshadowed by Mitt Romney’s dominant debate performance.

The Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, defended their coverage of the video to BuzzFeed, and said it was a major failure of the “legacy media” that the video didn’t get more play.

“Not only did we break stories that no one else would have written, we were mocked and attacked by flacks posing as reporters in the press,” Carlson said. “Like Sam Feist, the Washington bureau chief at CNN, immediately attacked us. On what grounds, I don’t get it. We shouldn’t air footage of a president giving a speech?”

Unlike some of his colleagues in the conservative press, Carlson showed no hint of regret at his site’s performance, citing record traffic, and crediting Obama’s first term with making the company profitable. In fact, he said he founded The Daily Caller out of frustration with the unsatisfactory vetting Obama received in 2008.

But for all the tough talk of his less reflective fellow travelers on the online right, Riehl, a true believer, remains leery of using click rates and ad revenue as a measure of success. He still wants their work to pay off at the ballot box.

“That’s something I said right after the election,” Riehl said. “I don’t give a shit about all these people talking about their page views. Look at the results. We did something wrong.”
====================================================

Is from Hamlet, who is afraid to commit suicide because he’ll have to face God:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Niskanen looked at both spending and taxes as a percentage of GDP. On average, he found, if federal revenues declined by 1 percent, federal spend- ing increased by 0.15 percent. When revenues rose, on the other hand, relative spending decreased.

The writer/analyst failed to note that revenues tend to rise when tax rates decrease. He was making a false cause/effect correlation relating spending increases and decreases to revenues, not simply noting that spending was increasing or decreasing. One did not cause the other.

If Obysmal and his Dem pals want to go back to the Clinton tax rates, that would be tax rates for all not just the upper tier, then we should insist on spending rates of that same era. What shall we cut or trim, eh?

the striking array of government benefits for the affluent that the conservative movement has won over the past 40 years. These include the reduction of the top income tax rate from 50 percent in 1986 to 35 percent; the 15 percent tax rate on dividend and capital gains income, which was 39.9 percent in 1977; the lowering of the top estate tax rate from 70 percent in 1981, with just $175,000 exempted from taxation, to a top rate of 35 percent this year with $5.1 million exempted from taxation…

NBCNews.com | Aired on November 19, 2012
Live camera overlooks Tel Aviv skyline
LIVE VIDEO — Watch a live picture from Tel Aviv, which has been targeted with rockets fired from Gaza as violence escalates.

Maybe some enterprising Republican can explain what the tax burden for all Americans will be if the Bush rates expire. They should not neglect to mention how the child/dependents exemption will be affected.

Add to that any other direct and indirect taxes and increased costs of living they will incur via Obamacare, food, and fuel prices.